


Do Galra Dream of Purple Sheep?

by BleedingTypewriter



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Bottom Keith (Voltron), Bottom Lance (Voltron), Consensual Kink, Emotional vampirism, Hurt/Comfort, Kink, Kink Exploration, M/M, Making Love, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation, Mindfuck, Multiple fantasies, Multiple kinks, Public Sex, Quickies, Romantic Fluff, Science Fiction, Sexual Fantasy, Sweet, Top Keith (Voltron), Top Lance (Voltron), Vignettes (kind of), Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:48:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24380791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingTypewriter/pseuds/BleedingTypewriter
Summary: Compromised on a Blade of Marmora mission, Keith faces survival in a dangerous prison: his own head. Stuck in a never ending lock step of reality and his own fantasies, it's up to Voltron, and Lance, to save him. It might prove trickier than anticipated; it's not that Keith doesn't want to be saved, he just doesn't know how to be when there's nothing to be saved from...
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

Keith accepts the mission without fully understanding it, but that’s not why it goes sideways.

He accepts a lot of things about the Blade of Marmora without fully understanding them. It’s a necessity in order to fit in. Questions aren’t exactly frowned upon, but too many in a row—especially if they start with _why_ —tend to lead to less-than-subtle hints that an overabundance of curiosity is a waste of time and resources. He’s learned that the finer political details are not for him to worry about.

At first he’d wanted to know exactly who they’d been infiltrating and why; had wanted to judge the morality of each species (and, by extension, the morality of the Blade) for himself before setting off.

Now he’s not sure that’s possible. He’s not even sure he cares. In wartime, neutrality can be as dangerous as aggression; overeager allies can be worse than foes. What matters is what needs to be done.

So when he’s ordered to infiltrate a planet placed right in the middle of what would be an ideal galra trade route, Keith doesn’t question it beyond the logistics. The fact that the species—the _Nouwi'santi_ , easily pronounceable with his clumsy half-human tongue, at least—is neutral and might be turned ally is irrelevant to him. Where they stand in the grander scheme of the war doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the galra may have contacted them with offers or threats to secure a new route. He leaves the bigger stuff to Voltron, should they ever come this way (and pretends that thought doesn’t hurt and vindicate and make him miss them in a way that can’t be mutual).

He’s to go in solo, quick and quiet. The Nouwi’santi are a psychic, empathetic species, dependent on emotion for sustenance.

The paladin in him wonders if they might be persuaded by Allura to help refugees; if they might be able to eat the fear and sadness of orphans and POWs.

The Blade in him makes a mental note to check the integrity of his suit to make sure his thoughts and feelings remain undetected while he scours their systems for evidence of a rat.

“In and out in a varga,” Kolivan orders, and Keith knows that means he’ll be on his own after a varga and a tick, and the simple, bittersweet adrenaline of that is enough to chase any thoughts of _why_ from his head.

He’s not sure what to expect from the Nouwi'santi, appearance-wise. Being a fundamentally psychic race, they alter the perception of the people around them. They look however another race might _want_ them to look. Kolivan had described them as nimble, blue-furred things with long ears and mousy temperaments, but he’s a full galra, and had met with one unprotected. Keith will be suited up and hooded, unaffected—and hopefully undetected—by psychic tampering. He won’t see them as a human or a half-galra would, but as they _are_.

They _are_ , it turns out as he lands in a cloaked pod at their central command base, fucking disgusting.

The base itself is expansive and pristine, metallic and gleaming with sharp, sterile corners and high ceilings. With his pod left clinging to the roof, he shimmies inside and gets a view of the building and its inhabitants from the top down, peering through a vent at rows of sleek grey shuttles, workers of all races scurrying between them.

He knows the Nouwi’santi by their uniforms, circular white crests gleaming against the impossibly matte black material of their…

...coverings?

He hesitates to call them clothes. The Nouwi'santi themselves are bulbous things, each of them made up of three or four gelatinous looking, beach ball sized spheres all piled up with flexible, veiny tendons between. They look like balloon animals; like they’d started out as long, featureless tubes and then been twisted into sections. The fabric they wear might be akin to a hat, if their top “section” could be said to be a head (though they have no faces, just two round, milky, protruding pustules that Keith supposes might be eyes). The fabric clings to the top sphere and wraps down to tie around the first connective tendon, and the black-and-white seems somehow vibrant against the grey of their skin. It’s _impossibly_ grey, so flat and neutral that their clumsy, floppy movements seem blurry and hard to track.

They don’t seem to be forcing the other alien species to work—the whole operation appears more supervisor-employee than slaver-slave—but Keith can’t be sure.

The paladin in him hesitates.

He can’t be sure…

...but he can’t save everyone, either. None of them can.

He has a varga (less the time it’s taken to land and get this far) to save himself, so he moves on.

Their intel is off—like _way_ off—but in a way, that’s a comfort. Finding his own way through the vents—working out that if _that’s_ the upper command barracks and _that’s_ the control room then their memory banks must be somewhere over _there_ —makes him feel less like he might be walking into a trap.

He finds the stack with over a half-varga to spare, and murmurs his success into an encrypted transmission he knows won’t reach Kolivan for several minutes (live comms had been too risky, the necessary output signal too strong to upkeep the cloaking needed to keep him hidden). He jacks in and starts the download, and mentally replays the turns he’d made to get here; tries to figure out if there’s anything else worth checking out before he leaves.

The download bar flickers on his datapad screen. The running series of letters (in a language Keith doesn’t know, and even if he did, coded at a level he’s not privy to) trip into English and then back into foreign curves. _n0m NOw_ it says, and then a few lines later, just as he’s starting to notice that something’s not right, _nOW NoW_.

The paladin in him wishes for Pidge. The Blade in him wishes for Regris.

The Keith in him grits, “Fucking _shit_ ,” and yanks out his jack as one half of his screen is reduced to _noWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnO_

_wnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownO_

_wNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWn_

_OWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOW_

_noWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOw_

_NOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNo_

_WNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWN_

_oWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOW_

_nOwnOWnoWNoWnoWnOWNoWNownOwNOwNOWnOwnOWnoWNoW_

He takes a breath. It’s thick in the closed in space of his mask. He’s perched in a tight space behind the stack, where the air is still and cloying. “Mission failure,” he hisses, “Repeat, mission failure, potential detection, pulling out…”

He’s aware of the falling before the noise. The stack he’s wedged against comes ripping out of the wall it’s attached to, so Keith goes from upright to strewn across an unfamiliar floor before he even registers the metallic ripping sound and almighty crash. He gets a glimpse of flat grey and milky white, and then a swarm of black and white is whirring around his head, eating away at his suit ( _shit_ , the goddamn fabric isn’t fabric, it’s _nanotech_ ) and a second later he’s looking a Nouwi'santi right in the face with nothing between him and it.

It strikes him a second later that it _is_ a face he’s looking at, not the mostly formless balls he’s seen before. It’s a humanoid face with a small, doll-like mouth and wide, unblinking blue eyes. The pupils are too wide; the blue is barely a sliver, the white clinging in the corners.

“Now, now,” the Nouwi'santi says, and Keith feels his body jolt, and there’s a hot, tingling burn at the back of his neck, and he falls asleep even as he’s still trying to get his feet under him.


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up in a room that might be comfortable if it weren’t for the metal cuffs holding him horizontal by his wrists and ankles. The walls are beige, the floor clean. It’s larger than the space he has with the Blades, and even furnished with a chair and a bed. It has a window looking out at an alien purple sky. It’s _carpeted_.

“What the hell…?”

His mouth is tacky, his tongue dry and uncooperative. There’s a dull, buzzing ache that radiates out from the nape of his neck and the faint scent of metal clings to the very back of his nostrils so he tastes rust from deep in his throat when he tries to swallow.

He’s overtaken, for a moment, with cold, empty panic. He jolts against his restraints; feels his palms go numb; breathes out a “ _Hah_ ” that’s in real danger of becoming a wail on his next exhale. Then suddenly—not quite on instinct yet, but getting there—his Blade training kicks in, but it’s distant; new. He takes quickfire stock: numb extremities, racing heart, uncontrolled breathing. The beginnings of shock, then. His responses are probably irrational. He’s still writhing against his bonds...that’s not good. Screaming will do him no good either. He needs to draw as little attention to himself as possible; needs to give himself time to come up with a _plan_ , needs to calm down and _think_ –

A garbled, twisted little whine sneaks out, and then it’s not Kolivan’s voice he hears in his head, but Shiro’s:

_Patience yields focus_.

He breathes.

He breathes.

By the time he has the feeling back in his fingertips and can see the chair across the room in single vision again, there are brisk, clipped footsteps outside his door. They get louder and quieter, louder and quieter, like someone is pacing.

He breathes.

No time to focus on a plan. He focuses on the door, instead, so he’s ready when it clicks open.

Keith decides, as four of them file in, that he’d preferred the Nouwi’santi in their true form, off-putting as it had been. Partially he hates the look of them outright: they all share the same doll-like, small-lipped, wide-eyed faces, each of them impossibly pale with close-cut white hair and dark, shapeless robes. They’re not _in_ the uncanny valley, they _are_ the uncanny valley. They’re so close to human with such exaggerated proportions that they’re hard to look at.

Partially, though, Keith hates the idea that just looking at them is proof that they’re in his head. Staring into those wide, unblinking eyes is a reminder that he’s already at a disadvantage. They’re already in his head, already controlling how he sees them.

“Now, now,” says one of the Nouwi'santi, “Disadvantage implies a likelihood above zero percent. There is no advantage or disadvantage to imprisonment.”

It takes a disorienting few seconds to figure out which one of them is talking. Their tiny lips hardly seem to move, even though the voice that comes out is high and clear; almost piercing. With its taunting _now, now_ , Keith wonders if it’s the same one that had ambushed him before.

“Yes and no. We are all that one, and we are all this one.”

Keith shuts his eyes. The paladin in him wants to know what that means; how it might affect the war at large. The Blade in him thinks fast and settles on _hivemind of some kind, instantaneous communication, another disadvantage_. The Keith in him thinks that’s a little dumb; agrees dourly with the Nouwi’santi: there is no advantage or disadvantage to imprisonment.

The Shiro in him breathes, and listens.

"We are not barbarians," the Nouwi’santi (the one nearest him, he thinks) says.

Keith blinks.

"You were wondering, before, why the cell is so comfortable. It's the principle of the thing: we are not barbarians."

Keith blinks again; tugs at his restrained wrist; tries to keep his thoughts a series of vague, wordless impressions.

The Nouwi'santi who'd spoken approximates a smile—the edges of its miniscule lips quirk up at an uncomfortably high angle, anyway—and the action ripples through the faces of the others. Keith gets the disturbing impression he's watching a stuttering, off-kilter zoetrope. "We are not barbarians, but we are also not stupid. Combat is not our specialty." It cocks its head to one side (so do the others, milliseconds apart; Keith wonders if they're doing it, now, just because they can sense how uncomfortable it is to look at). "It's yours, though. Combat is second nature to you. That must be difficult to handle: knowing that you were beaten by weak combatants."

It is. Patience doesn't help so much this time. This time it's Kolivan's deadpan, rapidfire Blade training that comes back to him: ' _If you're captured, they will want to break you, and the quickest way to do that is to break your resolve. The quicker you feel the quicker you fall._ '

"Uh huh," Keith says. "I'll cry about it when I get home."

He regrets his smart mouth almost immediately. The sound the Nouwi'santi make must be some version of laughter, but it's so piercing and discordant that it makes Keith shiver. Each of them trills in a series of flats and sharps that grate against each other and cut off at the same time so the silence itself seems jagged.

“You _are_ home.”

It’s an intimidation tactic, Keith knows, and he stays straight-faced against it, but they must be able to feel the way it works a cold, thin nail into his navel. Their tiny lips quirk up into smiles in that disconcerting wave again.

“That means you can cry now,” one of them says. Keith doesn’t catch which one. He’s finally almost glad for their uncanny, identical appearance; he can pretend it was any one of them and let the sudden sharp anger in his gut replace the fear, even if just for a precious few seconds. Neither fear nor anger are great in a crisis, he knows, but Shiro’s _patience_ is sadly ill-equipped for this situation, and at least when he’s pissed he can _think_.

Not totally clearly, maybe, but clearly enough to look a little closer at his captors (even if just because he’s glaring). Clearly enough to clock the clasps at their necks: tiny things glinting purple in the low light, a symbol etched into them so familiar that it doesn’t matter that they’re too far away for him to make out the details.

_Zarkon_.

Well, at least he has the intel. The Nouwi'santi have fallen to the galra empire.

They let out that awful trill-laugh sound again, louder and longer.

“For ten thousand years, every planet in the galra’s way has fallen to attack or destroyed itself in rebellion. Do you know what they did when they got to us?” The tiny mouths work in acrid satisfaction, still one after the other in their broken zoetrope. “They asked.” 

Keith’s face stays blank.

His stomach drops.

The Nouwi'santi trill.

This time, when they cut their sound, it’s with a jerky tilt of each too-big head. “You haven’t asked what we plan to do to you. That’s odd for your species.”

“I don’t go in for anticipation.” Keith’s mouth is dry, so his sarcasm comes out tackier on the edges than he’d like. He starts to wonder whose sake he’s even keeping up the front for.

“You should. It’s an acquired taste, but delicate. Like a palate cleanser.”

Keith tries to remember everything he can about the Nouwi’santi’s feeding habits, but beyond Kolivan’s basic explanation he draws a blank. Their biology hadn’t been his concern beyond the simple application to his mission: they eat emotions; do not get caught and let emotions be eaten. Whether or not theymight experience anything like _taste_ hadn’t even crossed his mind.

(It would have crossed Pidge’s mind, probably. She would have asked about it. Or Lance would’ve, in some obnoxious ‘ _they eat what now?!_ ’ kind of way.)

(That hurts. It does him no good, he realizes, to do his captors’ jobs for them, so he tucks the thought away as best he can.)

“Do you know why we took you?” they ask. Keith blinks; breathes; doesn’t allow himself to consider the options. “Come now, it’s not a trick question.”

“I was intruding.”

“You were. And if that were all you would be dead already.”

Keith clenches his fists as he feels his fingertips start to go numb again; forces air into his lungs even as they try to constrict. He can’t panic; needs to stay _here_. “What do you think I know?”

“Not particularly much. Certainly not enough to warrant interrogation, paladin.”

His fingers go tingly down to the knuckle. He clenches them and releases; clenches and releases; counts slow and breathes deep between each round. _Paladin_. It’s not the first time they’ve called him that. “Voltron,” he realizes. “You want to lure Voltron. I’m not a paladin anymore, they won’t–”

“That’s why the galra wanted us to take you. Do you know why _we_ took you?”

There are distinct footsteps as they draw closer to the bed, but their movement is smooth and strangely slow, a half-step too many movements crammed into the short distance to his bed. Only one ends up close enough to touch him, but when it raises it’s tiny hand the others do, too.

“We took you,” it says, “Because you’re a _delicacy_.”

The worst part of the touch, at first, is the hand itself. It’s cool and oddly stiff. At first it makes Keith think of a porcelain doll, but it has too much give for that; too much _life_. It feels like a hand just that side of rigor mortis; like a _kid’s_ hand just that side of rigor mortis. The miniature fingers trail up his temple and card into his hair in a gesture that feels inherently _wrong_ from something so child-sized and cold.

Keith jerks away, but the hand follows, and so do three others. The other Nouwi’santi are still mimicking every move, little hands hovering in mid-air, shifting calmly against nothing as Keith tries to writhe away.

A low, sick dread slits the base of his neck and slithers inside, right below the skin. It pulls itself down along his spine; tears bits of itself off along his vertebrae and leaves them scattered in the cartilage between. Every impulse that follows trips over the mess that’s left, comes out mired in it and pointed in the wrong direction, so that even the simplest body functions seem soaked in an all-over sense of _wrong_.

It’s a panic he’s never felt before, so pure it’s startling. It’s not a matter of thinking or breathing; there _is_ no thinking or breathing. The panic is the base of every thought. It’s in every breath. There’s no getting around it, it’s in his fucking _cells_.

“So much of you is inedible,” the Nouwi'santi says. “So much bitterness, so much rage, so much _fear_. But to us you’re like…”

And then the panic is nothing. It’s faraway, easy, gone, nothing at all to concern himself with when the world starts shifting around him. It flickers and stutters like he’s in a giant flipbook with half the pages torn out. He’s in the bed, not in the bed, in space, on earth, laughing, crying, running, sleeping, all, all, _all_ , like a best-of of everything he’s ever experienced on a reel running out of control, like someone’s rifling through his life and searching, searching, _searching_...

He’s not crying when it stops, but mostly because he’s barely breathing. He can’t get enough air to cry. He doesn’t have the wherewithal.

“A _pufferfish_ ,” the Nouwi'santi says. “That’s the one. You’re like a pufferfish, all rank and poisonous alongside the rarest of ambrosias.”

Another slit at the base of his neck, but this time it’s not dread that slips underneath. It’s not any particular feeling at all, so much as a general sense of _feeling for_. Where all the panic was, _Lance_ slips in. He takes the same path along Keith’s spine; leaves the same bits of himself behind; clamours into all Keith’s cells.

It should feel like something, Keith thinks, but he can’t understand what emotion it should be. It’s just _Lance_. Suddenly Keith’s in every room they’ve ever shared together, listening to every conversation they’ve had, seeing every fleeting glance he’s ever caught. Maybe it _is_ a feeling—maybe it’s _every_ feeling. It’s formless, thoughtless, just _Lance, Lance, Lance_ in a thick, cloying cloud that sticks in his sinuses and the back of his throat.

“Unrequited love…”

_LanceLanceLanceLanceLanceLance…_

“And so much of it, too. So much around the edge. So many sweet little things you’ve left to ferment there, like wine.”

Shiro, now, and Hunk, and Pidge, and Allura, and Coran, and Kolivan, all of them crawling all over each other, all over Keith, bulging under his skin, stretching him out and packing him in.

“You’re going to be a _feast_ , paladin.”

LanceShiroHunkPidgeAlluraCoranKolivanLanceShiroHunkPidgeAlluraCoranKolivanL _anceShiroHunkPidgeAlluraCoranKolivan–_

Nothing.

Only–

Not nothing?

Keith feels the bed, the wrist restraints, the sweat pooling in his clavicle. He feels the sharp, unyielding fear there, too, stronger than it was before. But it’s localized; confined; _nothing_ compared to the _everythingeverywhereallatonce_ of whatever the hell the Nouwi'santi had done to him.

“What–?” Keith chokes on his own dry vocal chords. They feel like he’s been screaming.

Has he?

His cheek itches. Crying, then, maybe. He feels like he can’t quite breathe. Is that because his nose is stuffed or because all that fear in the bowl of his throat is heavy enough to strangle him? Is it really all fear? There’s some rage in there, he thinks. Maybe a little shame at how easily he’s started to crack.

He doesn’t know anymore. Everything feels so _little_ in the wake of all _that_ ; so little he can’t make out the detail in anything.

“It will get easier,” the Nouwi'santi say. “Next time you won’t even notice.”

It takes a second for Keith to recognize the ensuing ragged noise as his own chest-deep sob.

_Next time?_


	3. Chapter 3

Keith can’t be sure how long he’s in the cell before Voltron comes for him.

He fights it as long as he can after the Nouwi’santi file out, but biology wins in the end: his adrenaline drops and his muscles turn to mush and he drops into a restless sleep. He wakes up feeling like hell, hair matted on one side and stuck to the side of his sweaty face, pillow soaked with spit that pools against the side of his mouth. He goes to wipe at it and can’t remember, at first, why his arms won’t come down; why his shoulders are so stiff. Between the damp pillowcase and the rumpled, body-warm blanket and his arduous trek back to the waking world, it takes a dizzy few seconds to put everything back together.

The mission, and the capture, and the _captors_ , and the _things_ the captors had done…

Panic flares for a moment, but doesn’t catch.

He’s alone, rested, and more aware of his circumstances. He can breathe. He can _think_. Things could be worse.

They could be _better_ , too, he knows, but he’ll take what he can get.

First things first, he shimmies up toward the headboard (a _headboard_ ; his _prison cell_ has _headboard_ , most of his foster families hadn’t even given him one of those) and pauses almost immediately, hissing through his teeth as his shoulders readjust. Slowly, _slowly_ , he inches his way up until his hands are pressed against the top of his head, his elbows bent in front of his face, his shoulders as flexed as they can get and fiercely protesting the fresh rush of blood.

He checks the room again while he waits for the pins and needles to subside. It’s oddly nice, but _sparse_. The Nouwi’santi are weirdly hospitable, but evidently not stupid. The furniture is welded to the floor, the toilet nothing more than a metal bowl protruding from the wall that looks more likely to break Keith’s foot should he try to kick it free. The ceiling is too high for him to reach, even if he were able to stand on his bed, and the lights are flat panels, anyway; nothing for him to deconstruct and use. The only vent in the room is long and narrow, crawling uselessly along one side of that impossibly high ceiling. Outside the single window, the faint blue sheen of a particle barrier shimmers between him and the brilliant alien sky.

So. No escape from here, then. He’ll have to wait until he’s moved— _if_ he’s moved. If not, he’ll have to come up with a way to _be_ moved. With the chair and bed secured, he’ll probably have to hurt himself instead of the room. He starts thinking of ways to be violent enough to cause a scene, or at least cause a scene _change_ (he almost wants to laugh at how extreme his Blade training had seemed until this moment).

And then, distinct in the so-far silence, two mirrored thumps outside his door, and a voice he hasn’t heard in weeks: “Guards down, do your thing, Pidge.”

_Shiro_.

Keith almost feels like he did when the Nouwi’santi were doing whatever it was they’d been doing to him ( _feeding_ , he supposes—though he prefers not to); like his step-brother is crawling right beneath his skin and packing Keith in tight.

They came for him.

_They came for him_.

Who’d even told—Kolivan? That’s surprising. He’d assumed the sensitive nature of his mission would mean that Voltron wouldn’t learn of his failure for days, maybe weeks. He wouldn’t have expected the Blade to compromise his location so quickly.

He would have expected to be on his own on this one, like a real Blade.

He thinks he’ll maybe be disappointed about that later, as fucked as _that_ is, but in the moment the confusion gives way to bone-deep relief. “Shiro,” he says, and he’s not sure if he’s laughing or if his voice is just shaking. “Shiro!”

But when the door slides open, it’s Lance who topples in first, stumbling in backward like he’d been leaning against the panel. Despite what he might say, what he _has_ said, Keith is often happy to see Lance, but perhaps never so much as right now. He’s even glad he flounders in, not reassuring in the least, perfectly _Sharpshooter_ in his ridiculousness. “Pidge!” Lance gripes. “Warn a guy!”

Keith can’t see her, but he can hear Pidge roll her eyes. “Lance,” she intones, “I’m opening the door, maybe don’t lean on it while you stand watch.”

“Guys, _later_ ,” Shiro orders, and then he’s there, bending over Keith, working at the handcuffs above his head and smiling at him like he’s not bailing out his little brother because he tried to fit in with the cool kids and got himself caught. He’s _there_ , smelling like sterile spaceship air and utilitarian Altean shampoo. Keith swears he could _weep_. “Hey,” Shiro says, “Hey, Keith, good to see you, buddy. We’re going to get you out of here, okay?”

Weeping goes out the window. Keith laughs, instead. “I’m okay,” he insists, “No need for _that_.”

“You’re going to be alright.” Shiro rubs at his wrists as the handcuffs fall free; massages his shoulders as he lowers his arms. “There you go…”

Keith blinks; tugs his hands away. “Shiro…? I’m not...uh…” He wonders if it’s been longer than he thinks; if the Nouwi'santi have told them some horrible plans they hadn’t told him; if they’ve already done something to him that he doesn’t know about yet. “I’m _okay_.”

His brother hesitates, then smiles, and pulls him up into a hug. “I’ll always come for you, okay?” he says, and it feels like weird timing, pressed into Keith’s hair in the middle of a prison bust, but it’s a glorious chaser to the near constant fear of the past however-long-it’s-been (and what does Keith know about things like social timing, anyway?).

“Okie doke, very heartwarming, time to go!” Pidge calls, and after a few wobbly steps, his body reacclimatizing to being upright and moving again, Keith is running behind Shiro and ahead of Lance, ducking down side corridors and squeezing into alcoves as security runs past.

Maybe it’s the relief of being rescued, but Keith almost feels like a paladin again. It’s strange being the object of a mission; being in a life-or-death scenario wherein he can expect the people around him to care if he lags behind. “You shouldn’t have come for me,” he hisses as they crouch in a dark dead end, Pidge scanning her map for an alternate route back to the lions. “It’s too dangerous here, the Nouwi'santi are–”

“Not allowed to have you.”

It’s too dim to make out the exact look on Lance’s face, lit from below with the eerie light of Pidge’s projection. He’s not smiling, though; not teasing. “Lance?”

“I’ll always come for you, too, you know.”

That’s…

How long has he been gone?

What had the Nouwi’santi been planning with him that even _Lance_ is so caught up in his rescue?

“This way,” Pidge orders, and they’re off again before Keith can spare it any more thought, sprinting from hallway to hallway until _finally_ they reach the hangar.

“I’ve never been so happy to see you in my _life_ ,” he tells Red, and swears the metal corners of her mouth pull back. He’s just about to her, already thinking about what to report to Kolivan and how, trying to figure out if anything he’s seen will be useful so the mission isn’t a total wash, when Lance catches him by the forearm.

“Huh?” he gets out, and gets a glimpse of Lance’s face, just enough to note that he can’t tell what expression _that’s_ supposed to be…

And then Lance is kissing him.

Keith jerks backward with another _huh?_ , sharper and higher, but Lance just laughs an airy _ha_ on top of it, and it makes no sense but he’s leaning in again and kissing Keith like it’s _fine_ —like Keith’s shying away is _silly._

Like this makes any sense.

Like the feel of his lips pressed up against Keith’s, all soft and chaste (the exact opposite of everything about them), is supposed to make sense.

Like the fact that Keith doesn’t actually want him to stop (because something in his stomach is curling up into a ball, and he kind of hates it and wants to bottle it at the same time) makes _any fucking sense_.

He tugs himself backward again and wedges his hands against Lance’s chest to stop him following.

It doesn’t…

This _doesn’t_...

“Lance, what are you _doing_?”

But Lance isn’t listening. Or...he _is_ , but he just keeps shaking his head and smiling all soft and leaning in until it feels like Keith is holding his entire body weight. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, and tries to wrap his arms around Keith’s waist, “I just want you to know…”

It _doesn’t make sense_.

Keith glances to the left and finds Pidge and Shiro waiting patiently, eyes on Red, like they’re giving him and Lance a _moment_ …

But that doesn’t make any sense, either.

Shiro should be hurrying them into Red. Pidge should be gawking, sputtering, making some kind of comment.

Even that’s not right. Shiro should be in a defensive position, eyes on the hangar door in case security finds them before they can board. Pidge should be contacting the castle by now...surely Allura must be nearby, poised for a wormhole escape. Lance should be climbing into Red’s pilot seat; hell, with their bond, Red should be scooping all of them up, appalled at their lack of movement in the middle of enemy territory.

…

Shiro shouldn’t have been so worried.

...

Lance shouldn’t have been so earnest.

There should be sirens. Alarms. Someone should have noticed his absence by now. There should be gunshots.

...right?

For a second, Keith swears he sees a few spark off Red’s flank, but no one else reacts, and there are no scorch marks left behind.

Lance leans in again; abandons his waist for his jaw to try to pull him in close. “Keith, I…” he murmurs.

But he shouldn’t be murmuring.

He shouldn’t be…

None of this should be…

Gunshots ring again, and this time Keith jerks hard enough to wrench himself free. He stumbles backward; blinks; watches dazedly as lasers rend the air and then don’t, appearing and disappearing in midair, the sound of them cutting in and out like the entire world is buffering. Keith drops instinctually, even though nothing seems to be landing, each shot dissolving against Red’s hull like it had never been there to begin with.

“Too far…” Lance mumbles, but he doesn’t move, not even as the phantom gunfire draws in close around his shoulders. And then he drops like Keith had, and shuffles forward toward him, even as his face stays placid and amused. “Just a little more...come here, just a little _more_ …” he keeps muttering, but the desperation in his voice doesn’t match the lax come-hither smile on his face.

Keith shimmies backward until Red’s hull is at his back. Lance follows at a crawl. The gunfire solidifies for a second; bounces off Red an inch to the left of Keith’s head and then disintegrates again into a wobbly half-reality. Nausea creeps up out of whatever had curled up in Keith’s stomach before as he watches a brilliant streak of red well up and slide over the white arm of Lance’s paladin armour, slipping between his fingers so he starts leaving smudged red handprints as he crawls closer.

He doesn’t seem to notice the wound. He doesn’t notice the next one, either, as the gunfire fazes in again and catches him in the back. He just jerks with the impact and keeps crawling, even as his smiling face starts to go pale. “More…” he mumbles. “Just a _little_ …” But he has to cough, then, because a thick gob of red is bubbling out between his lips, and when he speaks again his voice is choked and panicked (is it even _his_ voice?): “It’s going to collapse!”

The promise of vomit clings in Keith’s throat. The gunfire intensifies again. He chances a glance at Shiro and Pidge, but they’re still just _standing there_ , still giving them a moment, just twitching in place as shot after shot tears pieces out of them, and when he looks back at Lance the smile has finally gone from his face.

Everything has gone from his face.

There is no face.

Lance’s body creeps along, bullet-ridden, and where his face was there’s a _smear_ , as though all his features have been flattened and mashed along his skull like wet paint. All of it seems to move at once when he speaks, like his mouth is now the entirety of the gaping space behind the gaps and lumps that used to be his eyes, lips, nose (his fucking _face_ ): “ _Now look what you’ve done…!_ ”

Keith flops over to one side and retches.

The taste of bile floods his mouth and sticks high in his nose, so every ragged breath stings and stinks.

The sound of in-and-out gunfire fades completely. In its place is a retching noise that mirrors his own, loud and wet.

The ground is soft.

The ground is...not ground.

The salty drool spilling from one side of his mouth is soaking into fabric instead of pooling against a hard floor.

Keith is…

...in a bed?

He can’t move enough to roll over; can’t do anything but shake between violent gags. When he slits his eyes open he’s staring over mounds of rumpled sheets at the thin, waif-like torsos of two Nouwi’santi, and beside them the face of one, tiny lips open and curled as it throws up nothing.

“ _Idiot_ ,” one of them hisses, high-pitched and discordant. “You pushed too hard too fast, look what you did!”

And then another one speaks—or maybe the same one, but lower and calmer between one second and the next: “Calm down, paladin. Your brain is trying to reconcile the meal.”

Keith heaves again; fights the black that starts to tug at the corners of his eyes. “...meal?”

“The…” (God, fuck, _shit_ , that _rifling_ feeling again, like his brain is a cheap clipshow of his entire existence; there and gone in a hideous moment that leaves Keith retching again.) “...the _dream_ ,” the Nouwi'santi clarifies.

The black claws its way in a little further. “Lance was...he...what’s…?”

“You’ll acclimatize.”

The black wins out.

Keith drops into nothing.


End file.
